A genre-bending reimagining of Dante’s Divine Comedy, confronting modern audiences with modern sins
Nine Rooms in the House is a quietly unsettling work of literary fiction that resists easy classification. Part short story collection and part novel, Dave Ellis offers a narrative that explores what it means to live a meaningful life when meaning itself feels unstable. Through moral allegory and speculative fiction, Ellis invites readers into a reflective and oftentimes eerie examination of human failure and self-awareness, using death not as an ending but as a lens through which life is reexamined.
“This is what the next generation would inherit, be they cats or birds or lizards or maybe things that don’t yet exist. Things that are still in the mind of God, undergoing development before release.”
The book opens with a “Supporting Feature” titled “John’s Story,” set in a near future where humanity has decided it has become a net harm to the planet. As government-sanctioned extinction unfolds, the story follows John, who may be the last person alive, quietly recording his days as the world ends. While this story does not intersect with the main narrative in plot, it establishes the book’s central concerns: documentation, legacy, and the uneasy responsibility of being human. The “Main Feature” then follows Virgil John through three sections titled “Alison’s Book,” “Scap’s Book,” and “Virgil’s Book,” each pushing the flawed protagonist to confront the moral weight of his past actions, his failures as a husband and writer, and his unresolved resentments in death.
“Convince yourself that you can’t breathe and you can’t breathe…convince yourself that you can’t get out of the house and you can’t get out of the house…and he hadn’t left the house for a long time.”
Structurally, Nine Rooms in the House is both ambitious and carefully tempered. “Alison’s Book” unfolds across nine cantos in which a mysterious guide leads Virgil through moments when he acted at his worst, from infidelity to professional pride. In “Scap’s Book,” Virgil’s dog escorts him through nine rooms of a house, each room forcing him to revisit and recontextualize the events of the cantos.
Finally, “Virgil’s Book” places him within a warped reinterpretation of his former life, where conversations loop and routines repeat, creating a disorienting and discordant atmosphere of a mundane existence. The structure pays homage to Dante’s Divine Comedy while also nodding to themes and narrative frameworks found in A Christmas Carol and It’s a Wonderful Life, though Ellis never allows homage to become imitation.
“Towers always draw the human eye, and the human mind will always wonder what stories are told about rooms within the towers of old houses.”
What the book does especially well is blend genre experimentation with philosophical depth. As the narrative progresses, it slips subtly into science fiction and psychological horror, creating a persistent sense of unease without relying on shock factor. The refusal to offer tidy moral conclusions is one of the book’s strengths; the ending remains complex and unresolved, compelling readers to grapple with the implications themselves. Notably, the novel functions as an ars poetica, foregrounding the act of writing, storytelling, and record-keeping as both flawed and necessary human impulses. Ellis makes it abundantly clear that fictional stories have a way of revealing truth in ways personal experience often does not.
“‘Death is…death is an interval, the interval, a time for reflection, a time to map out what is to come.’”
Ultimately, Nine Rooms in the House explores humanity’s perception of time and how it terrifies us in its brevity, loses meaning in its infinity, and is shaped by everyday choices rather than singular grand gestures. Our lives are for the taking in our daily actions and encounters, not something to be “won” by one defining feat. Whether you are a fan of speculative fiction, science fiction, psychological horror, or poetry, Nine Rooms in the House is sure to leave you unsettled and reconsidering the role you play in your own life.
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